I saw a review of this new book on ballet history, "Apollo's Angels" in the SF Chronicle. Here is the link.

From the review it sounds like a very interesting and intelligently written book. Here's a quote from the review:

We move steadily from ballet's beginnings in the courts of France, through an isolated flourishing in politically stable Denmark, through crass acrobatic innovations in unstable Italy. The chapter on ballet in Italy seems unnecessarily long, but it is not: Those tricks en pointe and circus-like fouettes become the foundation for a more artistically invigorated flowering in Russia, where ballet thrives first as the art of tsars, then as Communist propaganda. Which leads to the Cold War ballet battles of East and West. And Homans crowns her geographic narrative with ballet in the United States, and with the Russian émigré who made ballet American: George Balanchine.

It received a positive review from Benjamin Moser in the November, 2010 Harper's Magazine. And it was heartening to read that book itself itself is a reposte to the idea that ballet is fading. But he was wrong to say there are no other general histories of ballet -- perhaps he meant in print?

This readers comment was just posted at the Times in a discussion about the book's premise:

Ms. Homans’ generalizations from the epilogue of her book published in The New Republic were disappointing as was her unsubstantiated attack on Hodson/Joffrey reconstruction of Nijinksy’s Le Sacre du Printemps. The epilogue read like it was the result of Homans’ editors urging her to make more definitive statements, take a stance, don’t be namby-pamby, write something that will stir up some controversy ...

The state of the art of ballet is good. Where it falters is in its yielding to temptation to try to relate to new audiences of un-likeminded entertainments, e.g., video games, tweenie rap, Club Whatever, with the hope that it will expand its audience. In doing so, it often offends its devoted core audience.

Ballet is missing the boat by not aggressively marketing to the over 50 market to build its audience. Many people will not come to appreciate ballet until their own bodies begin to fail them and until they have acquired enough life experiences so that they can appreciate the predicaments of the characters in Giselle, Swan Lake, Manon, and Dark Elegies. There will always be a never ending supply of old people who want something other than video games, tweenie rap and Club Whatever. Everyone grows old. Everyone slows down. Everyone comes to a time in his life when he just wants to sit in a chair and be entertained by something beautiful. Ballet needs to have more faith in itself, more faith in the value of its traditional artistic product, more faith in its traditional audience.

I read the book, all in one sitting. I wish the book had a more narrow focus, as is I think it attempts to cover way too much, although I admire Homans' love for detail and history. I like how she talks carefully about the origins of ballet, and the battle between pantomime and dancing steps -- a debate that's still here today. The book is stronger when writing about the origins of ballet, and the effect of Marie Taglioni. When she moves into the 20th century, some of the book becomes cliched and I didn't really need a book to know, for instance, that Margot Fonteyn was elegant, or Maya Plisetskaya was dynamic. Too bad, because when Homans does in-depth analysis of dance, she seems to have a sharp eye for detail.

The nice photos and somewhat history-book style of writing made me surprised at the epilogue though.

Where her book becomes more profoundly personal is in its final pages, when she looks back, around, and ahead, and concludes that ballet has essentially come to an end:

With depressingly few exceptions, performances are dull and lack vitality; theaters feel haunted and audiences seem blasé. After years of trying to convince myself otherwise, I now feel sure that ballet is dying. The occasional glimmer of a good performance or a fine dancer is not a ray of future hope but the last glow of a dying ember, and our intense preoccupation with re-creating history is more than a momentary diversion: we are watching ballet go, documenting its past and its passing before it fades altogether.

She is not the only lover of ballet who feels this way. The deaths of Ashton and, particularly, of Balanchine have left in their wake a mourning and depressed generation. It is now thirty years since we have seen anything like a major new work of classical dance, and those who believe that great choreographers move among us are either self-deluded or fools. Occasionally a talent announces itself, and we pounce—most recently on Christopher Wheeldon, whose limitations became quickly clear, and Alexei Ratmansky, who is not only highly capable but whose wide range is suggestive and stimulating. (Homans mentions neither.) But is it remotely possible that either of these gifted men is the one to lead us out of the desert to the promised land? And is it fair or reasonable to place such a burden of expectation on a newcomer, particularly given the intense spotlight thrown on anyone today who turns up with even a grain of real talent? Balanchine and Ashton were able to develop in near obscurity.

Is ballet, then, as Homans suggests, beyond rescue? I would like to believe that even if no new master comes along, the long-running love/hate relationship between it and modern dance that began a century ago when Isadora Duncan went to Russia and bowled over Fokine and his young contemporaries may yet lead to a fusion that will both preserve and reinvigorate classicism. Or that yet another relocation of the art—to Brazil, say, or Asia—may kiss the Beauty awake again. Or that new social dances like hip-hop may infuse ballet with a new approach and energy, the way Italian exhibitionistic tricks on pointe did in the 1820s.

This may well, of course, be wishful thinking, when we consider that the historical circumstances that brought ballet into being and helped it flourish—and that Homans has so meticulously anatomized—are, indeed, history. After all, other great art forms have withered away. If Homans is right—and when I’m not in a Polyanna mode, the odds seem to me that she is—there’s nothing we can do about it except celebrate and cherish what we’ve lost. Her book, indeed, is her way of doing just that, which is why she could give it the exhilarating and radiant title Apollo’s Angels rather than the title her conclusion implies, The Dying Swan.

I think the book is very well-written, by the way, and serves as a good background textbook for ballet. The pictures are wonderfully chosen. What it really isn't is dance criticism, and that's where I think the epilogue seems out of key. A book with a narrower time frame and tighter focus might have been more interesting, albeit less marketable.

Interesting that you mention Robert Gottlieb's review because his anthology "Reading Dance," while also very all-encompassing, manages to seem much less like a history book because of its eclectic, well-chosen selections of dance criticism.

Just out of curiosity, does Gottleib mention that JH wrote for the NY Review, too? A good editor should have made sure he said that...

No, he does not. I don't think that doing so in this case necessary, since it's a balanced review of a book that is written from a base of considerable knowledge and is non-controverisal. Neither Homans nor Gottlieb has serious axes to grind.

Gottlieb is generous in tone but includes criticisms and discusses a number of "slips." One of the most charming, it seems to me, is this:

Occasionally, though, her disinterestedness slips, as when she tells us that Taglioni’s international celebrity “set the pattern for Margot Fonteyn, Melissa Hayden, Galina Ulanova, and others to follow.” Hayden was certainly a formidable Balanchine dancer, but bracketing her with those two consummate artists strikes me as oddly off-key. Here the author seems to step out of ballet history and into personal history (she studied with Hayden at the North Carolina School of the Arts), but I can’t really begrudge her such an affectionate gesture of loyalty.

Gottlieb also has issues with Homans' treatment of Ulanova and Plisetskaya in regard to the question of what constitutes a "Soviet" (as opposed to "Russian") ballerina.

Just out of curiosity, does Gottleib mention that JH wrote for the NY Review, too? A good editor should have made sure he said that...

No, he does not. I don't think that doing so in this case necessary, since it's a balanced review of a book that is written from a base of considerable knowledge and is non-controversial. Neither Homans nor Gottlieb has serious axes to grind.

Oh I agree--I just think any publication should be transparent about reviewing its own writers (as is, for instance, the New Yorker, even in brief book reviews).

The ballet is dead or dying argument is a bit ridiculous and lacks any real foundation. The argument that Gottlieb makes in his review is aesthetic - it's that no good new ballet is in his view being made, no one has appeared who is the equal of Balanchine or Ashton. Even if true - and I think he underestimates the contemporaries - you can't base historical extinction on aesthetic features. On the contrary, there are a lot of companies right now, lots of tickets being sold, lots of schools, dancers, students, and interest and literature too. There's no reason to think this is a dying art form. Not to mention Homans, Gottlieb - even by hedging his bets - let's his nostalgia for his own golden age get the better of his judgment.

You can't base historical extinction on aesthetic features. On the contrary, there are a lot of companies right now, lots of tickets being sold, lots of schools, dancers, students, and interest and literature too.

Michael, I really appreciate your point. Even in Balanchine's days in NYCB, a great deal of forgettable choreography was danced all along. The great works that were created remain in the repertory and have been performed all over the world. If we are in a fallow period in terms of new choreography, surely this is not the first such time in the history of ballet.

Meanwhile, as you say, the dancers, institutions, and (less predictably) the audience are in place. One can imagine them waiting (even if they don't know it) for the next great flowering of artistic creativity. People seem to be fearful about knowing what this new flowering will look like. But that's also part of the excitement in any important art form.

Here's Claudia La Rocco's refutation of the ballet-is-dying thesis: "Is Ballet Really Dying? Don't believe the diagnosis in a new history of the Classical Tradition."

[size="4"]OFF TOPIC[/size]. Out of curiosity, I checked Jennifer Homans using the Author Search on the NYRB website. A single article turns up: a 2002 review of the book Stravinsky and Balanchine: a Journey of Invention. Thus, she is indeed someone who has written for and contributed to the NYCB. The track record is quite slim, however, and not very recent. Is it possible that Homans' review was overlooked by both Mr. Gottlieb (who in no way gives Homans a free pass in his review) and his editor? Gottlieb identifies her, properly, as the dance critic for the New Republic.

Beside the point, I should think. The NYRB is known for having its contributors write tactful and often flattering things about each other.

I imagine that all publications do this sort of thing at times. I was not aware, until now however, that the NYRB is actually known for this, in the sense of doing it habitually, egegiously, and/or as a matter of editorial policy. I've been a subscriber since the first edition in 1963 and can recall quite a few pointed and impassioned disagreements among NYCB writers and reviewers over the years.

It has never been done, what Jennifer Homans has done in “Apollo’s Angels.” She has written the only truly definitive history of the most impossibly fantastic art form, ballet, this most refined, most exquisite art of “aristocratic etiquette,” this “science of behavior toward others,” as a 17th-century ballet master put it, in which lovely young women perch upon their 10 little toe tips (actually, it is ­really just the two big toes that alternately support the entire body’s weight: think about it) and waft about where the air is thinner — but heaven is closer. She has taken this world where wilis, virgins, sylphs, sleeping princesses, the “women in white” embody the eternal — the eternally unattainable — and set it into the fabric of world history, and we see, miraculously, their pale tulle and satin pointes peeking out from the crevices of war, of revolutions, of political machinations, and on the ­stages of the monarchies and empires of the kings and czars who gave birth to this improbable art.

Later on:

Moreover, it actually feels as if she wrote the book in order to get to Balanchine, the one she loves, to put him in his deepest context, and to present him as the pinnacle of the towering pyramid of dance that she has built for him, for us. There he is, the undisputed “Yahweh” of all dance history, the Apollo of her title, accompanied by his beloved muses, his dancers, his angels, leading his chariot, no corseted doves in sight.

And it concludes with:

The Fabergé egg has fallen. Today’s ballerinas use Twitter, securing the fall of the fourth wall, and even Darren Aronofsky’s new ballet film, “Black Swan,” presents, uncannily, a haunting final image of a white tutu oozing blood. So what is one to do now, having seen, having known, a thing of such beauty that is facing imminent extinction? Jennifer Homans has put her mourning into action and has written its history, an eloquent and lasting elegy to an unlasting art. It is, alas, a eulogy.

I liked Homans' book but this kind of purple prose review doesn't help anybody.

I have a feeling the dance criticism world is fairly small and cozy, especially nowadays, and I really hate reading reviews that are not so much reviews as infomercials.

Yes, I posted the Bentley review in the Links earlier. Toni B. has always had a tendency to empurpled prose, and it got the better of her this time.

The ballet is dead or dying argument is a bit ridiculous and lacks any real foundation. The argument that Gottlieb makes in his review is aesthetic - it's that no good new ballet is in his view being made, no one has appeared who is the equal of Balanchine or Ashton. Even if true - and I think he underestimates the contemporaries - you can't base historical extinction on aesthetic features. On the contrary, there are a lot of companies right now, lots of tickets being sold, lots of schools, dancers, students, and interest and literature too. There's no reason to think this is a dying art form. Not to mention Homans, Gottlieb - even by hedging his bets - let's his nostalgia for his own golden age get the better of his judgment.

Thanks, Michael. Quite so.

I was not aware, until now however, that the NYRB is actually known for this, in the sense of doing it habitually, egegiously, and/or as a matter of editorial policy.

Dunno what to tell you. I can't point you to a link, but I know I've read about it and it's been evident in the magazine, at least to my eye. Such things are never a matter of editorial policy for obvious reasons. Opinions will differ.